The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects

LAM IN MAY: HABITAT CENTRAL

Need you wonder why we started a drinking game called “Portland” here at the magazine? The Oregon metropolis always has so much to show for its progressive thinking. A large team of landscape architects and other designers can take credit and pride in the new MAX Orange Line, seen on LAM’s cover this month, which at 7.3 miles is the latest addition to the city’s light-rail network. Mayer/Reed led the urban design of eight stations, and ZGF Architects led urban design on two others. Also involved are landscape architects who work for the client transit agency, TriMet, plus the Portland offices of Marianne Zarkin Landscape Architects,Lango Hansen Landscape Architects, and Alta Planning + Design. The rail route incorporates bold, colorful streetscapes with more than 3,000 trees, 286 bioswales, and—newer in the United States than in Europe—a short stretch of vegetated track bed. Sean Batty, ASLA, the director of operating projects at TriMet, tells the author, Betsy Anderson, Associate ASLA: “Are we trying to solve a transportation problem? No, we’re trying to solve an urban design problem, which we’re defining as landscape architects: We’re trying to create positive human habitat.”

The May issue of LAM has numerous other fine examples of habitat: There’s the new plaza around a campus residential tower at MassArt in Boston by Ground, Inc., which won a 2015 ASLA Professional Award for Residential Design. And then there is the enduring beauty of a residential garden by Isabelle Greene, FASLA, in California, as appreciated by Lisa Gimmy, ASLA. In the realm of animal habitats, we report on a new online tool developed by the entomologist Doug Tallamy and the National Wildlife Federation to help encourage property owners to create richer wildlife habitats everywhere they can conceivably do so. Our serial coverage of the National Park Service during its centenary year continues with a report by Daniel Howe, FASLA, on projects to promote large-scale landscape conservation around the Appalachian Trail.

This month, we are also looking forward to the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s 50th anniversary celebration in Philadelphia on June 10 and 11. LAF asked a number of landscape architects to write contemporary responses to the “Declaration of Concern” articulated in 1966 by Ian McHarg and several colleagues in response to the unbound environmental degradation they were witnessing all around them in those years. Five of those essays appear in this issue. And, as ever, don’t miss our regular Now, Species, Goods, and Books columns. The full table of contents for May can be found here.